Content Optimization: How to Optimize Content for SEO and Link Building

Content marketing has already solidified its stature as a powerhouse in the digital marketing realm.

In growing a brand’s audience and customer base, it’s certainly proved how formidable the practice is, especially when integrated with other data-driven disciplines (like SEO).

It’s no longer a trend. It has already forced its way to stay.

The Evolution of Web Content: 10x Content

The competition for attention has been taken to new greater heights. With the fact that a vast amount of publishers from different verticals have already bought in to the concept of pushing far more “great content” in a steadily growing rate (2 million blog posts are published every day).

What is 10x Content?

“Content that is 10 times better than the best result that can currently be found in the search results for a given keyword phrase or topic.” – Rand Fishkin

Great content is not as great when it is not well optimized. And optimizing content to be far more competitive for Search has tremendously evolved over the years.

Content optimization is basically the process of improving the aesthetics and performance of a site’s assets or pages that provide unique value to its intended users through on-page SEO, conversion optimization, UX, design, content editing and more.

Content Re-optimization as a Path to SEO Success

In my experience as an SEO, I think that there are 2 major strategic approaches to achieve success in SEO.

The first path is focusing the campaign in the technical side of search optimization. Ecommerce sites that have thousands of pages typically thrive in this kind of approach.

Whereas the second path to SEO success is relentlessly focusing resources on creative link acquisition campaigns – in which, honestly, our agency genuinely thrived for the past 3 years.

The last path, which I personally prefer these days, is focusing on making the most of what the site already have – through systemized Content Re-Optimization.

Where to Start?

This process focuses on page-level audits and enhancements, which makes it distinctive to what common technical on-site audits look like (which mostly focuses on sitewide changes on the onset).

It starts with assigning and interconnecting multiple goals for each of the page you’ll be optimizing, such as:

1. Making a single page rank for multiple search terms.

2. Owning Rank #0 in Semantic Search.

3. Increasing the likelihood of pages to earn links for informational queries.

Below are the necessary steps, once you know what you want to achieve for your campaign.

Step 1: Start with your site’s top 20 pages.

Get data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console to determine your site’s high performing pages.

Note:Prioritize those that are already helping the site generate leads/conversions – and most importantly, pages targeting keywords with medium to high monthly search volume.

Step 2: Analyze what your competitors are doing right for each query/page

The average attention span of humans has been increasingly getting shorter since the mobile revolution. It’s best to optimize your content for different sets of users – those who intend to learn and those who want to get to the answers fast.

Example:

Optimize content for skimreaders

Use shorter sentences and break long paragraphs.

Make the more interesting parts of the content look prominent (through appropriate use of subheadings, bold and whitespaces).

Provide unique value in your content by including ideas or other content elements that your readers will rarely find elsewhere.

This is what will make your content more linkable.

Providing freemium content is one of the best ways to make your content assets a link building machine.

Explore and learn from other industries.

For instance, other verticals don’t invest that much in interactive content. Be more competitive by taking your assets a step ahead than your competitors.

The same principle can also be applied to product pages – if you are running an ecommerce site, include the following elements:

Quick Buyer guides

“Did you know” or fun facts section about your products

Benefits

How the product works (visuals)

Then make detailed information optional and/or scannable

Lastly, it’s also imperative to learn how to design content for eductors. Study the types of content/pages that top .edu sites link out to in your space.

Wikipedia has been successful as a website, not just because of the length of their content, but also because of the depth of the information they provide for each of their content.

This is what makes thousands of their pages so powerful (searchable, shareable & linkable). Focus on topic depth, not just length.

Be better than the wiki of your industry’s web space.

Use “last updated” timestamps when reoptimizing and continuously upgrading your content’s depth. The recency of content can help boost SERP CTR, and eventually its search rankings.

Place the summary, conclusion, key takeaways or TL;DR version of your content where visitors can almost instantly see them – above the fold.

Providing quick and direct answers to users (who most of the time prefer to see the answers as fast as they can) can also exponentially improve visitor satisfaction.

This in turn can help your pages compete and rank for the Google Answer Box results.

Once I’ve determined which pages/queries have displayed rich snippet results, I can then restructure key sections of the content to match the type of Answer Box results being shown for each target query:

Provide logical and the most accurate answers to these queries and Answer Box types.

Structured Data makes it easier for search engines to better understand what your content is about. This is increasingly becoming more important in today’s search optimization (as Mike King mentioned, it’s the future of organic search).

Establish trust to users and search crawlers by citing/linking out to other authoritative websites and entities.

Cite credible sources within your own writing, especially those who will most likely help amplify your content promotion.

You can also make your content assets more robust by collaborating and seeking help from others (co-creation & co-marketing).

Pass more link equity and improve the crawlability of your key content assets by contextually linking your site’s other deeper pages to it.

Take advantage of your internal links by using highly descriptive (or even partial match) anchor texts. This will help your important content assets rank better for the keywords they are targeting.

Pass on more ranking value to your key pages by lessening the # of clicks from homepage. Including these pages to your navigation links (or any type of featured links visible to first time site visitors) are great examples.

What is Dwell Time?

Dwell time, in a sense, is an amalgam of bounce rate and time-on-site metrics – it measures how long it takes for someone to return to a SERP after clicking on a result (and it can be measured directly from the search engine’s own data). – Dr. Pete Meyers

The longer the dwell time (or the length of time that a search-driven visitor stayed within the website), the better. It implies that the searcher has been satisfied with the result it clicked from the listings displayed by Google for a query.

The following are several ways you can do to optimize your content assets for better dwell time (and conversions).

1. Provide clear Calls-to-action (CTA)

Make sure the CTA is relevant to your content asset

Prominently placed within the page (at the bottom, sidebar, header, or pop-up).

Continuously test and improve your CTAs

2. Establish authority with trust signals & social proof

3. Internally link out to related pages to boost dwell time on site

Your content assets should also serve as content layers that can funnel visitors deeper into your transactional pages (services or products).

4. Encourage social sharing.

Google has clearly put a significant amount of weight in speed as a ranking signal. They’re continuously obsessing about how they want everything to be fast in this modern age of the web (particularly for mobile users).

In which Google will primarily look at mobile versions of pages for its ranking signals and fall back on the desktop version when there is no mobile version.

With this upcoming big change to how Google will treat pages for ranking evaluation, considering to have mobile versions for your site’s key content assets in place could help improve their search visibility.

But there’s no need to worry if your site doesn’t have a mobile version, as per Google:

“If you only have a desktop site, we’ll continue to index your desktop site just fine, even if we’re using a mobile user agent to view your site.”

If you have a site configuration where the primary content and markup is different across mobile and desktop, you should consider making some changes to your site.

Make sure to serve structured markup for both the desktop and mobile version. Sites can verify the equivalence of their structured markup across desktop and mobile by typing the URLs of both versions into the Structured Data Testing Tool and comparing the output.

When adding structured data to a mobile site, avoid adding large amounts of markup that isn’t relevant to the specific information content of each document.